


The Fifth Wave

by Aya_A_Anderson



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Post-Apocalypse, Zombie/Eldritch Abomination
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-25
Updated: 2015-01-25
Packaged: 2018-03-08 23:01:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3226712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aya_A_Anderson/pseuds/Aya_A_Anderson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's easier not to think at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fifth Wave

**Author's Note:**

> From the point of view of the infected.

Midorima, if he was here as you changed, would consider this your third life. Pre-wave, during, after, was the simple version of his expansive classification system. Then he would tell you a long list of symptoms in his low, clinical voice. Midorima would tell you that Akashi was coming, and that Akashi was a bastard, so he’d probably make Kagami kill you. But Kagami loved you and you didn’t, and Akashi didn’t fully understand unreciprocated feeling. For Akashi it was mutual or nothing, and comprehending others was the only tenuous leverage Akashi still had, now that he was small and weak in a third life world.

You don’t mind being killed, but you’d prefer not to make Kagami do it, so you won't go back and visit Teiko in the fleeting moments when you remember the location. You don't know what had become of the base after Momoi had broken loose and returned with Aomine to maul the place. You imagine going in search of it, only to find them all gone. Worse, still there, all in little pieces, or whole, but changed like you. It's more than you could ever bear.

You feel anger, and sadness, but it’s inexpressible. It’s a tight knot inside your new chest. It doesn’t move or shift you, and quickly dies out like flame. There’s a candle in your room, and instinct tells you to keep it as far away from you as possible: you keep it on the dressing table, near your mirror, and let the sparks drift and fill your nose with cinnamon and vanilla, and though you feel afraid, the part of you that still can likes the smell and the colour and the warmth, that which you’d missed for a long time with the rest of them.

Often you wonder where they are. It all comes back in little cracks and snaps and sparks, some memory, for it to go again the next morning when you wake up from the nightly doze and for you to remember something else, and you usually think of Kagami. He isn’t terribly important now. You wonder if he thinks of you, if he pities you. And you have Aomine now anyway.

 

You vaguely remember stumbling upstairs. An inner-city house, white-walled and two story. This was where Aomine had found you, and where you both now lived, as far as you could call it normal living. It had a narrow upstairs hallway and bedrooms stripped bare of everything, both meaningful and meaningless. People were indiscriminate in their pickings, back then. The lights wouldn’t have worked, even if you’d checked.

You’d felt very strange at first, vomiting up blood with a great numb hole in you. You hadn’t panicked. It was as if instinct had known you wouldn’t do well to stumble around uselessly as you died. You’d all, Akashi in particular, envisioned it as death.

You sat there and expected yourself to fall unconscious, but you hadn’t. You’d felt nothing. It was as slow and unnoticeable as the start of the wave, the sickness, and then Aomine had been bitten and all of it was suddenly there, all of it at once.

Kagami looked at you, when he looked at you you felt a little warm, but it was nothing compared to how Aomine had looked at you, and Kagami knew that, because he had seen both of you together, and he knew how you felt and how little you slept, and how when you slept you dreamt of Aomine, how you woke up crying. 

You’d been mauled in your bed. That, you remember with clarity. You remember it because of the shock of seeing him again. Aomine (and Kagami and Akashi had said so, said he’d gone down in the Fifth wave, and you hadn’t believed them because you hadn’t wanted to) had bitten into your shoulder first, torn the joints out, then gone for the side of your face, and he had stared at you and there had been a light in his dark blue-grey eyes like there always was and it led you in.

It wasn’t a Fifth tendency to crack into the brain. They’d adapted from the First, they no longer had the capacity, with weaker teeth, more human, veins trawling up their arms running green and mottled with clotting blood. Aomine was haggard and looming tall and it was horrible and horribly ironic because he’d done that before, he’d chuckled and braced his strong arms on either side of you and lifted his lips to Kuroko’s throat, kissing downwards and biting red marks into his collar.

Aomine had been persistent, to last long enough to hunt Kuroko out, to rip out his throat.

Yours.

The first symptom of the Fifth is a loss of sense for the self. You’re Kuroko, and the flickering mirror propped against the cracked and broken wall is from somewhere else, and your hair and eyes and skin are very pale. Some days, you don’t think about what came before. You don’t think about Aomine, because he is here most of the time. You don’t think about Kagami, who you’d so achingly wanted to replace him but you couldn’t, because you still wanted Aomine. There’s no need to think about yourself. You shower and wash off invisible dirt, dirt that isn’t real, you repel it, and your hair doesn’t grow, and of course no one can see themselves age, so that didn’t matter either. You don’t eat, you don’t want food.

You’d never actually woken up, or gone to sleep, as Midorima had thought, but Midorima hadn’t wanted to believe any of it from the start.

Midorima was a bit unhinged to be honest, and Akashi had told him so, multiple times, but Akashi was a bit too utilitarian to be believed or followed by anyone in particular any more, because no one was how they had been before, and everyone settles down in different ways. 

Midorima was, for all intents and purposes, a doctor. He’d surely seen worse before the outbreak than after it. After all, the waves were just deranged humans with sharper teeth, in a way.

Certain people, like Midorima, later on like Kuroko, had lost someone. Midorima had grieved for five years now and everyone back at Teiko had known he’d just wanted to die, all that time without Kise. 

Kuroko had pitied him.

 

* * *

"If I die, stay with me," Aomine said gruffly.

Kuroko moved closer, looking up at him. Aomine looked terribly strong. "Aomine-kun won't need me if he turns."

"Tetsu." He looked deathly serious. "I want you to kill me if I turn. Okay? Do that."

* * *

Then Aomine was right in front of him, straining against the chains. He said Kuroko's name again and again. 

Akashi had scoffed and left the room, but Kuroko hadn't left. You'd stayed and watched him. You'd cried quietly, and Aomine had seemed distressed and confused, the first bit of emotion he'd showed since Kagami had captured him. 

Then he and Momoi had broken out. 

* * *

You never thought it would happen to you. 

* * *

 

Kise toes the knot of Midorimacchi’s shoulders, fingers brushing Midorimacchi’s ankles, and since Midorimacchi makes no move to stop him, Kise thinks that means he should probably keep going. Midorimacchi is stressed, more and more so every day closer to university examinations. Medicine takes ten years to study – who knows what can happen in ten years? Anything, really, and they would probably break up long before Kise could find out where Midorimacchi would be, and that hurts so much Kise feels as if gravity is acting more strongly upon him all of a sudden.

Kise doesn’t realise he has paused, halted all movement and is lying back staring at the ceiling contemplating university and the distance of years until Midorimacchi huffs and says, “What is wrong with you today?”

“Nothing,” replies Kise, impishly. There’s nothing wrong, not really, or at least nothing that Midorimacchi could control if he knew. Kise starts working his feet back over Midorimacchi’s shoulders, feeling them slacken under the pressure.

Kise really worries about Midorimacchi, sometimes.

He worries so much his heart creaks and aches like nightingale floors with it.

Midorimacchi sighs again, he’s been sighing so much recently, and goes back to his work. He has a small stack of large textbooks on the bedroom floor beside him. Kise rubs Midorimacchi’s calves and pities him, not knowing how he’ll fare in his exams, whether he’ll have to repeat a year of his degree or not, having to base his future off studying in the now. Kise knows exactly where he himself will be next year: fully immersed in the industry for most of the working week, most likely acting, and though he hasn’t decided whether he wants to keep studying study part-time it’s looking like a bit of a pipe-dream given all his other plans. He’ll be travelling and Midorimacchi will still be studying, in Tokyo.

(And then eight years on someone else had dared call him Midorimacchi and Midorimacchi had killed them.)

 

Momoi had hypothesised biological weapons. Her’s was a comment Kuroko quickly disregarded, and you don’t know why you remember it now, because biological weapons had simultaneously been very far and not so far off the mark after all.  Her greatest strength had been the capacity to tell apart fallacy and speculation from hypothesis and truth, and she’s remembered by almost everyone she meets. Momoi isn’t a fan of fiction, and never has been, too far removed from ordinary, acceptable truth to be in any way plausible and hence enjoyable. She is, however, very much aware of popular culture, and knows as the mortality rate racks up and up, as it had over the past two years, biological weapons are a more comforting alternative than a bug spreading indiscriminately, unintelligently, a foreign entity unmatched by humankind working its way into dominant systems of life.

Momoi knew wanting something to be true cannot make it so, and wishful thinking helps to a point.  

"The illness doesn’t die with them," Midorima had told her, and Kuroko had been there on the lawn at Teiko University to hear it. "The word ‘dead,’ now, is a mistaken term, for the afflicted are brain dead and sleeping but not dead in the sense that their hearts do not beat. Therein lies the problem."

“You can’t pull the plug when they’re still alive!” said Kise, emphatically, and many of the girls nodded along and agreed with him.

Momoi said nothing. She knew from experience that voicing her opinion left her open to the barrage of Stop Taking Everything So Seriously and Wow, No Need to be Such a Bitch All The Time, but Momoi also knew that boys like Kise would go first if it ever came down to it. The rest of them, the men, were generally more practical than Kise was, but practical at the expense of emotion, and they would go second.

Kuroko agreed with her. Around the Third, boys suicided in ratios of twenty to one girl like Momoi. For all their practicality they couldn’t bring themselves to hope, and Momoi knows she has the best of both. And now she was okay, she said to Kuroko at Teiko base, at least she wasn’t mauled yet. That was said before she was. 

(“We’re at risk of greater rates of infection,” Midorima tells Momoi, under his breath. As if Momoi didn’t know so already. “By keeping them alive, we’re keeping It alive.”)

Kuroko remembers how Midorima always called the sickness ‘It,’ as if he dare not speak its name. Kuroko knows he was so afraid, even before Kise.

(There were rallies and everything, and Momoi goes to most of them to take photographs and recordings on her little black recorder, and she writes about them on her computer. It’s gone a mile, now, her computer, probably broken into pieces in something’s hollow stomach.

“But, haven’t they done twitch-tests and everything?” Kise said. Kise was very afraid until he was mauled and then he was very dead and Midorima had killed him. "They’re not just unable to respond," said Momoi, "They can’t. Their brains are decomposing inside them! And still, they pass it on.”

“How do we know that? How do you know the virus isn’t in the hospital aid workers’ food? How can someone whose brain is practically rotting inside them,” and Midorima spits the words, “be alive, and passing on sickness? It’s completely implausible.”

“Sure, it’s implausible,” said Momoi, “but the disease is sustaining itself. If the brain’s decomposing, there’s no better reason to pull the plug and save more unnecessary death.”

“You’re talking about human life, here-”

And then Momoi had sighed Kise’s name, patting his blonde head as Midorima watched, disgusted. “...You’re not talking about dogs infested with rabies. Not rodents, Momoicchi. They're alive, no matter the state of their brains. These are people, who need help.”

“They can’t be helped,” Midorima says. “They’re dead. Only the living can be helped.”

“And how would you define that?” Kise asks him, derisive and all too sure of himself. “Anyway, you’re all taking this way too seriously.”

And there it is.

“It’s not a huge mass break-out. We’ve had worse, right?”

Midorima huffs and draws Kise over a little closer to him, and Kise had hummed and rested his head against Midorimacchi's strong shoulder. All couples fought a little, and Kuroko stops paying attention to either of them as soon as Aomine sprawls out beside him. They all nod and shrug and turn back to whatever they were doing, and some of them turn to alternate topics of conversation, because at that point, Kise was reasonably correct in that there wasn’t much to fear aside from clustered cases under lockdown in cities a little way distant from theirs.)

 

* * *

But Aomine had never cared what Kuroko thought or wanted, even when he was ripping his teeth into Kuroko's throat and tearing his way inside him. It hadn't felt so different from how they were before. 

* * *

 

There’s a great blank gap between Aomine tearing into your chin with his familiar teeth, and you lolling against a wall, head slipping onto your shoulder on the second floor of some house in the middle of territory claimed by Aomine’s kind, watching the overcast sky. You’d thought it was funny, as you lay there and thought you were dying, that your brain was failing but you wouldn’t really stop existing.

That might be what Aomine wanted. You could be together until you died.

“Don’t leave,” Kuroko said, every time Aomine did.

Aomine looked at him and held him and pressed his forehead into Kuroko’s hair. He didn’t say anything. Aomine had known –

No, both of them had known.

how there was always a chance of a Wave striking randomly, and of Aomine being struck down with them, whenever he or any of them went outside Teiko.

But Kuroko loved him and he couldn’t stop loving him. Kuroko sometimes thought about how they’d been so close to breaking up before the First wave, how Kuroko’s impassiveness had annoyed Aomine and Aomine’s careless laziness had angered Kuroko. But something had happened to all of them, and underneath it all Kuroko still lived Aomine and Aomine still loved Kuroko, and why should any of that stop when Aomine was turned?

 

You hadn’t passed out. The more lucid of the Fifth – Aomine, Momoi, faces sharp and hungry and angry as Murasakibara chained their limbs to walls – said it was all the same, for all of them, that initial drop and then waking up different but still intact. If Momoi could have cried in that short time she was held captive by the gutted remainder of Teiko, she would have. But she wasn't human, so she couldn't. You felt her grief now, her frustration, her desire to kill all of them. It was all relative.

Knowing you were slowly losing your mind, watching the sky, and heard who you thought was a Fourth stumbling up the stairs. You knew something was wrong when the Fourth ignored you, gone straight for the cupboards instead, probably smelling blood and attempting to find the source, and it was your blood, you could feel it all caking your hair and face and neck and trailing down into your shirt, but your blood wasn’t clean anymore. You remember knowing what Aomine had done, and it was a double ache of fear and betrayal and then love for him that you always felt, still feel, but you really couldn’t feel anything at all, couldn’t feel your skin or your eyes blinking much, no pain, and you’d tried so very hard to cry and couldn’t. You didn’t even want to. The absence of fear scared you.

You didn’t move. You lay there for a while, thinking, of important things you’d once needed to do and say, but you didn’t need to do that anymore. You sort of saw, or imagined, Aomine finding the Teiko base, finding the rest of them and destroying everything Midorima had on his kind. The more human Kuroko imagines seeing Aomine and wondered what he will do when he finally finds you.

And he will find you, because he’d promised to. He’d promised to find you when he bit you, breathed it right into Kuroko’s ear, and Kuroko had clutched feverishly at the back of Aomine’s shirt and sobbed into his chest. It would all be different, now Aomine and Kuroko were both mauled and turned, but it couldn’t be so different when you were missing a beating heart to love someone you’d always loved. Either he would find Kuroko, or Kuroko would go to find him, as soon as Kuroko could move.

But then he did find Kuroko, lying on the bathroom floor. He'd picked you up in his arms and held you. It felt just the same. This is their new life in an abandoned house and Momoi came to visit and all three of them were always hungry and lost in their own heads.

“Don’t leave,” Kuroko said, and Aomine did, and Kuroko doesn’t know if that sort of betrayal could be revoked when Kuroko can’t feel anything with this new hollow mind and Aomine is deranged. You love him. They aren't so far off from the humans now. 

You have to stop. You look away from a sleeping Aomine, in the bed reflected in the mirror, and you question whether you were thinking about yourself, or someone else entirely. Him. Kuroko Tetsuya, you.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I swore I'd never write in second person, but haha I lied!


End file.
